In fact I would go so far as to conjecture that as probability that a paper will be widely cited goes up, the ability of the paper's author to know how many times the paper has been cited diminish to nothing.

Anon 3: What are you talking about? Citations are carefully tracked by a number of organizations (including Google Scholar and citeseer). Sure, both are imperfect, and miss some citations and count some things that shouldn't count. But I would imagine that they both give very good approximations to the "actual" citation count.

Many of the places to which I am applying this year ask applicants to attach PDFs of their "three most important papers." Given your discussion, now I have to wonder if they are seeking to learn about the candidate by observing which of these choices the candidate makes.

Don't worry about no one citing your papers (except for obvious reasons). Many important mathematics papers were "useless" until much later. For example, the notion of imaginary numbers took 200 years to be widely accepted.

Popularity contest...um, I mean impact factor, is only a relatively recent phenomenon.

Putting aside the Tarski Grothendieck set theory papers (which appear to have some odd citation convention) you'll notice a number of things. Longer works like books tend to get cited more - they cover more material, and they're frequently taken as the authority on classical matters, rather than the original publications. In a way, you know your work is most successful when people begin to take it for granted, like the earth they stand on, and think of it as undeserving of citation - there's a reason the original papers on linked lists aren't on this list.

Citations is also peculiar as a relative measure. Is the genetic algorithms paper twice as important as the RSA paper? Are R-trees more important than C++? Not really. There are patterns and conventions to citations within certain subfields, and perception of the paper comes into play. A paper that, like the RSA paper, is recognized as the single authoritative original source for a sudden insight, may have an easier time getting cited than one of a long, incremental series of papers, such as the 20 papers required to prove the Robertson–Seymour theorem, or the many papers associated with the Human Genome Project.